Detained Immigrants at Federal Immigrant Detention Center in South Texas Stage Hunger Strike Over Alleged Abuses, Denial of Due Process

We turn now to the vast network of immigration prisons in Texas, many of which are privately operated by for-profit corporations. As many as a hundred people held at the Port Isabel Processing Center near Brownsville, Texas, have been on a hunger strike since last week to draw attention to alleged abuses in the facility and their extended detention without due process. Prisoners say their complaints to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, about lack of medical attention, denial of food and other abuses have fallen on deaf ears.

They began the hunger strike last Wednesday and are demanding to meet with Dora Schriro, the newly appointed special adviser on detention and removal for the Department of Homeland Security.

Independent journalist Renee Feltz interviewed one of the hunger strikers, Rama Carty, for the Texas Observer. Carty was born to Haitian parents in the Democratic Republic of Congo thirty-nine years ago today. He has lived in the United States for thirty-eight-and-a-half years and has been detained by ICE for over thirteen months after serving a two-year sentence for what he says was a wrongful drug conviction. Carty described why people at the facility are refusing to eat.

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